


Restless

by prairiecrow



Series: Lethe's Curse [12]
Category: ReBoot (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Blood, Depression, Insomnia, Intersexuality, Love/Hate, M/M, Memory Alteration, Mind Control, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-08
Updated: 2012-05-08
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:28:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bob is having trouble sleeping — and trouble letting go of things he can't have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restless

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Takes place on the world of Lethe, where Bob and Megabyte awoke stripped of their memories, formed an alliance of convenience — and found themselves, one day, profoundly physically changed. 2) This story is set after "Possession" and before Megabyte makes his bid to overthrow the Red King. 3) A picture of Megabyte and Bob at this point in the chronology: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v189/crowdog66/lethebobmegabyte-1.jpg

Beyond the tall windows that usually admitted plenty of southern light into Megabyte's palatial quarters the late afternoon loomed grey and grim, and surprisingly cold: driving winds had lashed heavy rains against the pastel towers of Cestiala for the past three and a half days, a summer storm of the sort the city endured at least once a year when the currents in the usually calm sea beyond her harbours churned, some said, with the restless memories of the Harvested that its impenetrable depths refused to relinquish. It was also said that the Harvested slept especially poorly on those nights when summer lightning writhed over the pale streets of Omalan's capital, and Bob could well believe it; certainly he'd had an uneasy time of it himself lately, only drifting off into broken sleep in the small hours of the morning and awakening far too early, his eyes and his heart heavy with a quiet depression that he suspected all the quf in the world couldn't be able to disperse.

Megabyte, of course, didn't sleep at all, and Bob was on the verge of hating him for it. Certainly he found the virus's unshakable composure more annoying than usual when he himself was sitting gloomily in a window seat, his back against the broad wooden frame and his left shoulder against the glass, his arms clasped around his drawn-up knees and his feet crossed at the ankles while he stared up at the weeping sky without really seeing much of anything. A large cup of quf sat on a small round table beside him, the beverage long since grown cold, but he still took an occasional sip from it and found that the dead taste suited his state of mind perfectly.

A few yards away from Bob's right shoulder an esoric lamp cast a pool of clear yellow light on Megabyte's wide desk: the virus was hard at work as usual in his profession as a Court scholar, reading an insane number of books simultaneously and taking copious notes while he was doing it. Every so often he rose to his feet and Bob could feel as well as hear his metal-shod footfalls as he crossed to a shelf to retrieve another volume from his collection, then returned with the same measured pace. Normally his lover's methodical rhythms were almost soothing, or at least not irritating, but at the moment Bob was in a distinctly jumpy mood: every sound, every trick of light, every stray thought seemed the enigmatic warning of some impending doom. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or maybe it was the fact that Megabyte _was_  actively plotting to seize the Kingship, a dangerous proposition at best.

Or maybe it was just the rain, chilly and relentless, perhaps recalling some other afternoon in a life Bob had long since lost. He found that prospect even less comforting than the others.

The crisp flick of a page being turned scraped on his ear, and he bit back the sharp sigh it provoked to a little snort, then rested his left cheekbone on the glass. It felt like ice. "Megabyte?"

"Hm?" Bob had learned to read the virus's tones with a fair degree of precision; that curt response told him maybe a tenth of that immense mind was paying attention to the sprite staring out into the rain. That should have irritated Bob even more. Instead it just made him feel a more restless yearning for something he couldn't even name.

"D'you ever wonder —" He stopped himself and gave himself a little mental shake: posing the question that way would only earn him an even quicker dismissal. Phrasing was vitally important. "Do you ever remember anything about what you were before coming here? Anything at all?"

The pen scratched briskly at a journal's paper, laying down angular characters at a speed Bob couldn't hope to half-emulate on his best day. "You know perfectly well that I don't — and furthermore, that I consider the question irrelevant."

Bob watched his own breath steam on the cold glass, subtly quickening. "How can it be irrelevant?" he argued, even though he knew his words lacked their usual snap and burn. "I mean, it's pretty damned clear that we came here with our personalities intact — it was all there, from the second you plucked me out of the surf and held me up by the scruff of my neck —"

"And you shot me." At least there was a tendril of dry amusement in his expressive voice now.

"Like you didn't deserve it," Bob grumbled, then finally let the sigh slip free. "I… I dunno. The things that made us who we are have got to be important, don't they? Maybe…"

The pen paused in its course, and he didn't have to look up to know that a red-in-green gaze was now fixed on his profile. "You're in an uncharacteristically somber mood this afternoon."

"I'm just tired of not knowing… anything." He raised his head and unwound his right arm to trace slow lines in his condensed breath-trace on the glass with the tip of his index finger, crossing each other again and again. "I mean, for all I know I could have family back where I came from. I could have parents, or brothers, or sisters… or a wife."

A light laugh, mocking and beautiful. "Oh, I sincerely doubt that, Bob."

He scowled at the storm: he didn't have to turn around, after all, to know the amused quality of Megabyte's thin smile. "Not that I really care, but… why not?"

The pen resumed its brisk strokes. "Let's just say that you don't strike me as the marrying type."

"Hell," Bob continued, " _you_  could have a ligor, for that matter."

"Or we could have taken the ligos with each other," Megabyte purred with just the right amount of cruel indifference to sting in spite of Bob's perpetual readiness for slings and arrows from that particular tower. 

"Yeah," Bob scoffed, " _right,_ " and picked up the thread the virus had tried to cut: "Or children. I could be a father, and so could you — or even a mother, in your case."

"I see this is a multiple choice alternate reality," Megabyte observed.

"I'll bet you laid eggs," Bob said spitefully. "Like a scorpion lizard. And abandoned them all under a rock."

"If they were your children, how could you possibly blame me?"

There was almost no condensation left under Bob's obliterating finger. He let his hand drop with a subtle slump of his shoulders, then wrapped that arm back around his shins almost as an afterthought. "Wives, husbands, children… parents and siblings… they could all be out there, waiting for us to come back to them. And we'd never even know." Megabyte didn't deign to reply, and after a moment Bob uttered a harsh little laugh, his silver brows tightening. "I don't know why I'm surprised. Nothing matters to you except power — getting it, trading it up, hoarding more and more of it like a dragon with his gold, screwing over anybody who gets in your way. It only makes sense that you'd —"

"Don't be ridiculous," Megabyte snapped. Bob heard him set the pen down, then the soft drag of the desk's chair being pushed back on the carpet: surprising, yes, but he didn't look round as those heavy footfalls approached him. "The fact that you're alive to throw around unjustified accusations is proof enough that a great many things matter to me — including, for reasons even I sometimes completely fail to understand, you."

"Gee, thanks," Bob muttered, and closed his eyes. "Nice to know that you care."

He felt the virus's steel weight settle on the other side of the window seat, then the audible caress of that voice, like muted thunder close enough to touch: "Look at me, Bob." Grudgingly complying, Bob found Megabyte facing him with his ridged spine erect and his eyes glowing with their own strange light in the greyness that surrounded them. "What, exactly, are you missing so keenly?" the _catlana_  asked, studying him with apparently idle curiosity that Bob suspected — or rather, hoped — concealed a deeper degree of engagement. "Friends? Surely you've cultivated your share of those since coming to this city. Family? I suspect you could have one of those for the asking if you set your mind to it. Perhaps with that charming young singer, what was her name again…?" 

Bob wasn't fooled by that tactic either. "Hask," he said curtly.

"Ah, yes." Megabyte's lips curved in a way that was both kindly and menacing. "She's a member of your own species; I suspect she'd prove highly compatible."

Bob snorted again, this time with derision. "I'm not breeding stock, Megabyte — and neither is she. And besides," and for the first time all day a genuine smile quirked one corner of his broad mouth, "I'm pretty sure you'd kill her if she tried anything."

This time the laugh was considerably darker. "I might, at that."

It was a somewhat disquieting expression of affection, but coming from an aloof creature like Megabyte, Bob took it for what it was worth. Leaning forward, he rested his chin fully on his knees and reached out his right hand to lay it over Megabyte's left where it rested on one armoured thigh. For a long moment he studied the contrasting colours of their skins, azure and scarlet layered over indigo delicately shading to burgundy, before speaking slowly and thoughtfully: "I want… I don't know what I want. Connection, I guess. Something to ground myself in, maybe. We've been in Lethe for almost nine months —"

"— two hundred and thirty-eight days, to be more precise —"

"— and we still don't have the slightest idea who we really are." He smiled again, ruefully this time. "And I want some sleep, definitely. Feels like I haven't closed my eyes in a week."

Megabyte was studying him more intently now; Bob could feel the weight of it pressing against him like the heat from a furnace. "Speak for yourself, Guardian: I, for one, have a very firm grasp on who I am."

"The future Ruler of Omalan, right?" 

"Among other things." He turned his hand so that it rested palm-to-palm with Bob's, then lifted the sprite's hand to study the fall of his fingers. "So fragile," he mused, "and so transitory… perhaps it's not surprising that your concept of self is as insubstantial as the wings of a fairy fly."

"My 'concept of self' is just fine," Bob retorted. 

"Is it really?" Megabyte countered, his gaze rising to Bob's face again with the force of a palpable rebuke. "Your obsession with an irrevocably lost past suggests otherwise. Tell me, what benefit would remembering an entire lifetime of sleeping and waking, of cups of quf and lacklustre meals and routines endlessly repeated, possibly confer that your present existence is lacking? What if you were to discover that you'd been a drudge, or a dock worker, or something equally boring and menial? What if you regained only a sense of perpetual quiet desperation?"

Bob shook his head with more emphasis than he'd been able to muster in a few days. "No!" he said decisively. "That's not possible."

The virus raised a sceptical eyebrow ridge. "Because…?"

"Because…" Bob suspected he was walking into a trap but was too tired to figure out what it was. _Cestia's balls, I'd kill the Red King myself for a few hours of sleep…_  "Because I wasn't any of those things. Whatever I was, it was important. It made a difference." He nodded toward his right forearm, where his keytool rested in armband form. "Why else would I have Glitch? It wasn't to move boxes around, that's for sure!"

Megabyte smiled the way he always did when he thought he'd won. "And if you're truly convinced of that much, is there really anything else you need to know?"

"If I had a wife and kids, yeah, that'd probably be worth remembering." 

The brow that had been raised sank to form an imperious frown. "Even if you could never make your way back to them," he said flatly.

"Don't worry, Megabyte." He retrieved his right hand and lifted it to lay it on the virus's hollowed cheek, letting himself smile with both exasperation and fondness. "No matter what I had before, it would have to go a helluva long way before it came even close to you."

"I'm so pleased to hear it," Megabyte smirked — and twisted his neck, snake-quick, to nip Bob's right thumb hard enough to pierce the skin with his silver teeth.

" _Hey!_ " Bob tried to pull back, but steel fingers had already locked around his wrist, holding him fast. "What the hell are you —?"

"You said you wanted to sleep, didn't you?" His hold on Bob wasn't painfully tight, only unbreakable as he studied the marks that his fangs had made, already red with dots of blood, and continued in a low seductive tone: "I can give you that much, Bob — deep, restful repose without the nightmares that have been troubling you these past nights." His gaze shifted to meet Bob's, challenging him and trying to command him. "If you'll let me."

After a moment Bob nodded reluctantly, and watched with uneasy fascination as Megabyte closed his glowing eyes and delicately stroked the wounds with his long slender tongue of ebony: the process of soul-sharing wasn't one that they engaged in frequently through Bob's own choice, and previously it had only occurred in the context of lovemaking, but the sensation of an alien etheric presence flowing into Bob's veins was the same, and the euphoric drift that made him feel as if he was floating free of his own body. Within seconds the restless disquiet that had troubled him since the summer storms had started was relegated to the dim mental distance and fading fast, driven on the wintry winds of Megabyte's will; an ineffable peace, almost a numbness, covered him like a fall of deep silent snow, and his vision blurred with such rapidity that he had to close his eyes. He felt himself sinking toward his right and let himself fall, trusting that he'd be caught and, not two seconds later, supported and lifted in a pair of strong steady arms. 

"Not fair," he mumbled against the virus's angular shoulder as Megabyte turned toward the bedroom, even though he'd agreed to this. "So, _so_  not fair…"

"But effective, I'm sure you'll agree." 

"Mph." He tried to open his eyes one final time and failed. And then he was being laid down supine on his side of the bed, and the blanket that always lay across its foot was being unfolded and briskly drawn over him, and tucked in snugly around his shoulders.

Megabyte's murmured words fell upon his closed eyelids like elegant traceries of frost, making them even heavier. "Go to sleep, Bob. Memories have no power over you, and neither does anything else."

"… 'cept you…"

A muted chuckle, full of gloating pleasure, and the slow stroke of curved fingers down the line of Bob's cheek. "Always," Megabyte both promised and threatened, but Bob only had a heartbeat's span to dimly feel the bittersweet ache of it before the virus's command took full effect and he went willingly into the darkness, warmly shielded in winter's own embrace, finally granted peace by the never-ending dance of opposing tensions in perfect balance.

THE END


End file.
